>A friend just finished jury duty in Federal court and had a difficult time
>reaching a verdict. It was a drug case involving transporting meth. The
>problem she had was that she felt the police lied and tampered with some of
>the evidence to strengthen their case but that they did so unnecessarily.
>She believed the defendant was shown to be guilty even without the
>questionable evidence. Her question was basically whether it was acceptable
>to find a defendant not guilty, in spite of believing in his guilt, in
>order to punish the police for lying and altering evidence?
I don't think I'd ever vote to convict anybody for a drug-related offense, regardless of guilt. (I haven't decided whether it's morally acceptable to convict any non-privileged member of society for any crime.) Which necessarily means I'd vote not guilty to punish the police, I suppose, although that would only be a fortunate effect of my vote.
What a lot of people don't realize, even on the left, is how pervasive this kind of police and prosecutorial misconduct is. You'll be hard pressed to find a single criminal case that goes to trial--even something as relatively minor as a DWI where no jail time is at stake--in which the police do not lie and prosecutors do not cheat. This fact is why your friend saw it in a run-of-the-mill drug case in which the defendant's guilt could have been established without such fraud. Problem is, when there are no repurcussions, the behavior continues with impunity, and, inevitably, innocent (poor) people get convicted. What's amazing is that this behavior even extends over into the police labs--scientists employed by police departments to conduct forensic scientific testing on evidence will also routinely lie and even manufacture test results to get a desired end. This came out, specifically, during the investigation of the Houston Police Department crime lab, which was responsible for sending at least two innocent men to prison (and probably dozens more...there are no resources in Texas available to find out who, so the rest must suffer).
Defendants and associates trying to help them out sometimes try to lie as well, but, on the whole, the accused and their poor brethren are orders of magnitude more honest than police and prosecutors. This is ironic given jurors' and courts' reflexive penchant to automatically discount the testimony of defendants and those who testify on their behalf while automatically deeming law enforcement testimony credible. (I suppose it's not actually ironic that courts do this, because they are little more than extensions of the prosecution.) I think a large part of the lie disparity between the State's agents and defendants is the fact that the poor are more or less intimidated into telling the truth. Certainly, they take great risks when they lie to such authorities, whereas authorities themselves take no risk, because the State is not in the business of punishing itself. And when the poor do lie in connection with criminal proceedings, it's almost always at the behest of the authorities, as in snitches who claim the defendant confessed to them in a cell so as to secure a better deal for themselves. Rarely do defendants and witnesses on their behalf get on the stand and lie. They probably should, though; it might even the playing field a bit more.
Not that it really matters. I firmly believe that most guilty verdicts are returned based solely or, at least, primarily, on the mere fact the defendant was chosen for prosecution. In other words, verdicts, by and large, aren't based on evidence; most rest solely on the jury's subservience to the State and obedience to authority The prosecutors wouldn't even need to say anything. Simply by virtue of the authoritative position he or she occupies, his or her selection of the defendant for prosecution conveys to the jury that the defendant is guilty and jurors almost always accept that to be sufficient evidence of guilt.